Walter Bright:
I worry that this is too complicated to be worthwhile.
After seeing the error messages given by Clang I think it could
be worthwhile. In C++ it has saved me debugging time.
I used to do that, but again, it was a completely unwanted
feature, and I
abandoned it.
It's simple enough to grep for the error message text, and I
myself prefer
to do the grep method.
At the moment in D learn people show the error messages generated
by dmd and don't know what to do. An archive of errors, one error
for each wiki page, is useful because the user sees a longer
description of the error, plus two examples of it (where it could
be recognized better if it's really the right error), plus
explanations how to fix it, like to use "const" or "inout" or to
use an alias inside a class etc.
The problem with grepping is that it could lead to mistakes, you
have to grep for the whole error message, otherwise you risk
finding the wrong message. Another problem is that the wording
could change, both in different versions of the same compiler and
in different compilers, so every compiler needs its own wiki.
Also, if you need to use a search, you must have all the error
messages in the same page, while with error messages you could
just go directly to the page number and you don't need to copy
and paste several (all) the words of the error message. Having a
standard number across all D compilers allows for a
standardization of tools (the IDE has to show the same error
tooltips regardless the D compiler you are using). Another
advantage of numbers of error messages is that if two different
points of the same compiler have to generate the same error,
using the same code number there is no risk the error message
could go out of sync to each other. This has happened in DMD,
where I have seen the same error give different error messages
with the same dmd
(http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11094 ).
What makes me grumpy is people only want these things when some
other
compiler does it, sort of a bandwagon thing.
I have tried to show, here and in Issue 5004, that's not true.
And even if it's just a fashion as you say, I could argue that in
computer science and programming there are far worse fashions
people cling to. Sometimes when you create an engineering product
it's not enough for it to be technically very good, you also have
to wrap it in a colourful, fashion-aware and pretty paper. If you
miss doing that, you are doing 99% of the necessary work for
success but you are missing far more than the 1% of "overall
appreciation" for your product.
Bye,
bearophile
